


here comes the rain again

by nedsbayou



Category: Twenty One Pilots, Tyler Joseph - Fandom, josh dun - Fandom, joshler - Fandom
Genre: 80s, Cassettes, Crushes, Forbidden Love, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Skating, Some angst, cool!josh, lots of fluff, mixtapes, roller skating, shy!tyler, skate rink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-05-06
Updated: 2020-05-06
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:22:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24031249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nedsbayou/pseuds/nedsbayou
Summary: (title references the eurythmics song)tyler joseph is the shy introvert who works the snack bar at the local rollar skate hall. josh dun is the best skater to ever exist and might possibly be an angel in disguise. at least tyler thinks so. circa 1985.
Relationships: Josh Dun/Tyler Joseph, joshler
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	1. prologue.

**Author's Note:**

> i got the idea for this plot from finding an old mix tape jammed in my boombox. i've never been so excited to write out a plot before lol. every chapter is named after a song from the era that has to do with the chapter. i'll release some playlists later on in the fic so you can listen to what tyler associates with the summer of 1985. i hope you fall in love with it like i did. :)

I would do anything to go back to that summer. Is that corny to say? That I want the summer of ‘85 to happen all over again? That I want to feel alive like I did back then when I was 17? Because honestly… That’s the only time I remember ever feeling like that. It was something so real. So raw. I felt so… _Alive._ There’s no other way to describe how he made me feel. He was a live wire, and I’ve never met anyone like him. I don’t think I’ll ever find somebody like him ever in my life. There isn’t a single person on the face of the planet that could compete with him. I can say that with as much confidence a man could ever have. I’m not 17 anymore, and I’ve met more people than I could imagine ever meeting, but I still find my thoughts wandering back to him. He sneaks up on me. He appears in my dreams. There’s a whole shrine behind my eyes dedicated to him. I have a deep desire that he might have made one for me, too, behind those pools of mocha I often found myself lost in. Maybe not now, but I’ve always hoped I plagued his thoughts like he did mine. Even if he did reserve a part of his brain for me, has he revisited that graveyard lately? Is it covered in cobwebs? Is it caked in dust? Or is it neat and pristine like the section of my mind that’s all about him? Does he flip through the memories we have together nightly like I do? Does he remember it all in vivid technicolor, too? There’s so many questions. _So many._ I want to ask them all. I want to spill my guts to him like I used to on the phone during our late night conversations when I knew nobody would eavesdrop on our call. But that was a promise I made that I won’t ever break. A promise we made to each other a very long time ago. A pact to never speak of the summer of ‘85. But I’ll be damned to hell if I don't admit that I think of it every day of my life.


	2. i. send me an angel - real life

Things didn’t make sense to me like they do now. Sure, I pretended to know everything. I had my own way of figuring out concepts and explaining them to myself so they made sense. I hated asking others outside of my own brain for help, and that was a fatal flaw of mine. I had tunnel vision as a kid. The world was how I explained it to myself, and that was it. It was a black and white world with rarely any gray areas that I couldn’t pinpoint a definition on. When I say rarely, I mean there were enough of those gray areas that I could count with both my hands and maybe a few toes. I had my world down pat in my own head, but when things colored outside of the lines, my teenage brain would freak out. The tiny elf that organized all the files up there would set everything ablaze. Those gray areas could really mess me up to ridiculous lengths. _He_ was one of those gray areas that colored outside my lines. _He_ was the gasoline to all my fires up there. _He_ drove my elf madly insane on a weekly basis that soon shifted into a daily basis. _He_ had a name too, but the little elf dubbed him as _Angel Boy._ It grew to be such a revolting title as I got to know him. My teenage brain hated it and wanted to reject it. He hated that idiot elf for giving him such a sentimental name. For thinking of another boy in that limelight that was reserved for the pinups on his walls. It became the kind of name that made him feel sick. Like his stomach had a dagger in it that was constantly twisting and shifting. But I’m getting ahead of myself now.

_Tucker’s._ That’s what the skate rink was called. It had been around for the longest time. I don’t really remember when it was built exactly, but I do remember how much of a staple the place was in our tiny town in Ohio. We weren’t even on the map for a lot of the town’s existence. That’s how sad it was. Our town was tiny. Maybe had a population of about… 5,000? That meant, for us as kids, we had to scavenge for a place to hang out and have fun. Tucker’s was a few miles from our school and a lot of our houses, so that’s where Friday and Saturday nights were spent mostly. I remember thinking the DJ of the place was the coolest guy alive. Even when it was dark out, he would wear his Ray Ban sunglasses around. He was some college drop out who DJ’d for a living, so he walked around with this ‘I couldn’t care less’ kind of attitude. _Man_. I looked up to him. Steve was his name. He didn’t have a single care in the world, and I wanted to be just like him. Cool and collected. Steve didn’t seem like the kind of guy to over think like me. He was a go with the flow kind of dude who played some of the best music I’ve ever heard in my life. So, when my mom was screeching at me to finally get a job, I thought of Steve. Cool guy Steve, I called him.

I managed to snag a phone number slip off a help wanted poster on the school bulletin board, and within the week, I was in like Flynn. They assigned me to the snack bar which I wasn’t too thrilled about at the time, but it gave me a pretty sweet view of the rink and Steve up on his platform, rocking out to Duran Duran or Modern Talking. He was a new wave kind of guy, and he got me into them. Not surprisingly, I recognized a lot of people at the rink. Tucker’s was in a town that had way more people than we did, but I guess a lot more people from home preferred it rather than the locals. Tucker’s was pretty much a hub at the time for all of us high schoolers. Anyone who was anyone showed their face at Tucker’s.

It was about two weeks into the job when I truly got familiarized with everything and everyone who hung around at the rink. There were some regulars that I managed to learn the names of. It was funny. They liked it when I remembered their names and orders. It was a big hit with the girls I would try to attract. They’d giggle and I’d see them eyeing me while they skated together. Working at Tucker’s really turned me into a whole new person, honestly. Teenage me outside of the rink was a whole different breed than teenage me inside of the rink. Maybe it was from the energy Steve gave off--his coolness might have been rubbing off on me even though we rarely ever spoke to each other--but this newly gained confidence grew on me. I had a certain sense of pride of being able to run the snack bar. A lot of times it was just me. It seemed like I was the only employee who really cared about doing my best. Others would either abandon the post to catch up with some friends or leave the shift early. And God, on the weekends, it was the worst. It felt like my head was going to explode with all the orders that flew in at once. And it was just little ol' me in the back running the fryers, grill, and drinks all at the same time. I was overwhelmed, but at the end of every wave of orders, I’d always get rewarded with a sight. It was _him._

I’ll never forget the first time I saw my _Angel Boy._

I had just pushed out the most orders of fries I had ever made--and to this day, I don’t think I’ve seen as many french fries as I did that shift. I was exasperated, to say the least. I figured now was the best time to give myself a little break before I’d get slammed with more orders. I resumed my usual duties of sipping my can of Coke and watching the skaters. I’d see the usual girls with leg warmers that matched their scrunchies cruise on by. Some wore sequin tops that caught the beams of light that danced off of Steve’s DJ setup. I would laugh to myself sometimes because they reminded me of overgrown disco balls. The girls always looked good, but it was the same old stuff. My eyes wanted something new and exciting to get amused by or maybe get a good laugh from.

I had come to the end of my Coke to the point where my straw was making obnoxious sounds at the bottom of the can. _Time for a new one,_ I thought to myself. _Otherwise… I dunno how I’ll make it through the shift._ Before I stood up from my stool, my eyes had caught hold of the new amusement they were searching for. They locked on somebody even smoother than Steve. It was a tuft of messy dark brown curls that were gliding past everyone. I had never seen this kid before. He occupied the inner circle of the rink that was reserved for the _advanced_ of the advanced skaters. It was the unwritten law of the land. No beginner would dare to step foot in the inner circle. You knew you were good and everyone else knew it, too, if you skated there. So to be a _looper_ in the _fast lane,_ as we called it, was a huge deal. You were the best of the best. This tuff of brown curls that occupied the fast lane definitely fit that mold. Never had I ever seen someone so graceful and quick on their feet. It was like he was _born_ to skate. I don’t know if he was aware of it or not, but his entire body was choreographed to never miss a beat. Like he had practiced moving to this song a thousand times over. Maybe he did. It was _Rock with You_ by Michael Jackson. Everyone and their mom knew that song. So maybe he had skated to this song numerous times before. Even if he did, it didn’t seem humanly possible to be as flawless as he was. Like the song was tailored just for him. Like Michael Jackson himself shook his hand and dedicated the song to the kid before Steve played it. It wasn’t just me that was completely under this guy’s spell, either. The whole rink practically stopped to see him glide. I didn’t have a word for it back then, but he was so ethereal in that moment. The tuft of curls enthralled everyone around him. Even Steve watched the kid for a solid minute before getting back to mixing in the next song. That was _big_ if you even got Steve’s attention. _Who was this boy? Where did he come from?_ I could hear the murmurs from the skaters that whizzed by. _Heaven?_ A girl had joked. But it wasn’t much of a joke to me. That couldn’t be closer to the truth. Maybe he really was from heaven. He couldn’t fly with wings, but damn could he fly in those skates.

Ever since that night, he’d catch the attention of my eyes every time he was on the rink. Usually, after a week or so, they’d get bored of the same old thing. Nothing had ever held their attention like _Angel Boy._ Every time I would see him, I’d manage to pick out something new about him. _Haircut. New laces. Sometimes he had glasses. Sometimes he didn’t._ I had always been good with picking up stuff like that; the small things that nobody thinks too much about. The elf upstairs likes to log it all in the filing cabinets, so nobody can catch me off guard about the stuff I might have missed. Usually, the cabinets would be typed documents--typically in list form. But _Angel Boy_ . Everything about him made it into full color pictures instead of black and white pieces of paper. The elf never filed them away, either. He would hang them up all over his office so it was stuff I’d see all the time. Whether I was at school or in the shower or about to go to sleep, the damn paintings the elf made of that so-called _Angel Boy_ were plastered everywhere in my mind: They were inescapable. At the time, I liked to think of it as me just admiring his skating style. I’ve seen the pros on TV before, but they were nothing like _Angel Boy._ Along with the skill, it was just pure talent that he possessed. Talent is something God-given while skill is something that you can build upon. He had both which I now know as a rare encounter. 

I worked nights from Thursday to Sunday, the rink’s prime time. When I was there, he was there, too. I liked to imagine sometimes that he would change things up on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays when I’m not there to watch him, but that’s assuming he was even there on those nights. I started to pick up on his routine. He seemed to be a creature of habit. The little elf upstairs was sure to paint every detail that he could get his grubby little hands on. First, Angel Boy would come in with his duffle bag full of skate equipment. It was this electric aqua shade that was more blue than green. He’d always take the second locker on the left in the second row to put his stuff in. _Locker 202._ It was the perfect one for him, after all. He didn’t have to duck or tippy-toes to get his things. It was all at arms reach for him. Next, he’d do his stretches. He would switch them up sometimes, but he mainly stuck to the same quad and calf stretches which yeah, that’s smart on his part. I found him to be more flexible than I had remembered every time I’d see him stretch. I guess, in my mind, roller skating couldn’t help you do the splits, but this dude definitely seemed like he could. After his little warm up, he pulled his skates out and laced them up. He had a couple different pairs which wasn’t too surprising considering how skilled he was. None of his pairs were boring either. They were a plethora of colors. Some skates were a solid color--the solid yellow ones he had will always be my favorite--while others had crazy patterns on them. Regardless, he rocked them no matter what. I might have had an idea as to how many skates he owned, but it seemed like he had an infinite amount of laces. He _always_ had new ones. How many sets of skate laces could somebody own? He had me questioning that with every visit. Angel Boy always had this ritual of doing a loop or two around the bench by the lockers before he carefully made his way out onto the rink. And he did this every night I saw him. Starting promptly at 6:30, sometimes 6:45. It was almost like a religious thing for him with how on point he was with everything. I’d never seen so much commitment into a hobby in all my life.

Maybe he caught hold of my observations because he started visiting the snack bar a week or two after I first noticed him. It just so happened that every occasion he dropped by were the ones where I was alone to run the ship by myself. He always got the same thing, too. Angel Boy always made it easy for me, and I’m not quite sure if he knows how thankful I was for it. Sometimes I thought he did it on purpose just to give me a break. Whether he was even aware of what he was doing or not, the order was always a medium Pepsi with a little ice. The first time he asked for that, I couldn’t really hear his request over the loud music so I messed up and gave him a medium Pepsi with _regular_ ice on accident. I’ve had people _flip out_ on me because of it before. I was prepared for Angel Boy to lash out on me and do the same, but he didn’t.

“Thanks…” he smiled at me “glad to know there’s some Pepsi with all this ice.”

I wasn’t completely aware of the mistake until he cracked the joke. Usually I'd be in panic mode at that point. Maybe it was the smile or just the lighthearted nature of the comment in general, but it lifted all the weight off my shoulders instantly. I laughed quietly and was geared up to fire out a reply, but he just took the straw from my hands and coasted away before I could say a thing. He resumed his routine to Michael Jackson’s _P.Y.T._ without missing a single beat. That was probably for the better. Some form of word vomit would have come up if he hadn’t gone away.

_Damn… How did he do it?_ I wondered to myself as I watched him roll away. Every move he made was so graceful and delicate yet meaningful and bold at the same time. I never thought I would even use those words to describe somebody as they roller skated.

As his movements began to enchant me again, it dawned on me that I had just served _the_ Angel Boy. Him! The man, the myth, the legend! Angel Boy, _himself._ And I did it like I was no big deal? Like he was just another customer but I managed to mess up his order? Little elf upstairs tsked at my mistake as he hastily added _medium Pepsi with a little ice_ to his gallery.

**☂︎✧**

It was difficult not to have Angel Boy be the first thing my eyes landed on during every shift. He was just always around. All the time. Those disco ball girls didn’t interest me one bit the same way Angel Boy did. Not to mention, I know for a fact they can’t skate like him if their lives depended on it. I was so convinced that we quite possibly had the best roller skater in existence right there on our rink at Tucker’s.

I didn’t notice just how late he was staying until the only thing I could hear was MJ blasting on the sound system. When the third Michael Jackson song played in a row, I knew something was up. Steve would _never_ double play an artist let alone play the same artist _three times_ in a row. I rested the broom against the wall and made my way up to the front of the snack bar counter. Know and behold, Angel Boy was the only one left. I later found out it was Angel Boy’s skate mixtape that was playing all of that Michael Jackson. Steve had left for the night, and it was just me and him in an empty skating hall with _Thriller_ as our soundtrack. I was wiping the counter down as I eyed Angel Boy a couple times, hoping he didn’t catch my stare. After his third or fourth lap around the brim of the rink, he made his way to the DJ booth to eject his precious tape. The music stopped and it was just silence.

I knew this was my chance. My chance to talk to him or at least get to know his name instead of calling him _Angel Boy_ in my own personal narrative. I exhaled breath out of my mouth and went to collect my broom from the kitchen. I had to sweep out there, anyway. My usual game plan was to start around the snack bar, then work my way out. I decided to do it the opposite and start on the farthest end of the rink where the lockers were. Where Angel Boy was. I chewed on my bottom lip and made my way over to the other side.

_Why am I so afraid? It’s not like I’m meeting a celebrity,_ I thought to myself. _Well I guess… He is kind of a celebrity to me. Whatever! He’s just a dude that skates here. Don’t do something stupid._

I chewed the inside of my cheek as I started to sweep around the bench and the surrounding floor of the lockers. I made sure to keep a comfortable distance between myself and him just so I didn’t freak him out or something. It was just the two of us, after all.  
  
“I see you staring at me, you know…” The voice of Angel Boy broke through my thoughts. That was the first time I had ever heard his voice so clearly before. “You don’t do such a good job at hiding it,” he chuckled lowly. 

I looked up at him nervously. My cheeks were getting a little warm from embarrassment, but I tried not to think too much about it. “Oh… Sorry about that,” I chuckled awkwardly, rubbing the back of my neck. “It’s just- You’re really good. You’re good at skating. And it’s like… interesting to watch.” _Was that weird? Was that weird to say?_ Too late. Already said it.

“Thanks, dude,” Angel Boy smiled with that same grin he gave me after I’d give him his _medium Pepsi with a little ice._ “Do you skate?”

“Oh… Me? Kinda? I guess? Not really. I- I try to, but I’m not too good. I prefer watching,” I shrugged as my eyes flicked away from his every so often. I found that it was difficult for me to hold eye contact with new people for more than a few moments.

“Ahhh… _Just a spectator._ I get it. I used to be like that, too, but let me tell ya,” he kind of leaned in closer to me “it’s so much more fun being the skater than watching somebody else do it.”

“Ehh. I don’t really know about that,” I reached to scratch the back of my neck again.

“Don’t believe me? I could teach you a thing or two about skating that might change your mind if you’d let me.” Half of his smile morphed into a little smirk. “How’s Friday at 4 o'clock sound? You don’t need to bring anything. Just meet me at Clancy Creek.”

“Friday at 4 o'clock…” I muttered to myself like I was thinking about if I wanted to go or not. _Of course_ I wanted nothing more than to meet up with him and learn to skate, but I wanted to act cool. Like cool guy Steve. “Okay. Friday’s good for me.”

“It’s a date then,” his lips pulled into a full grin again. “I’m Joshua, by the way. Everyone just calls me Josh, though.” He stuck his hand out for me to shake.

“Nice to meet you, Josh.” Wow, that felt amazing to say out loud instead of secretly calling him _Angel Boy._ “I’m Tyler.”

“Tyler…” he nodded before repeating my name and saying it slow. Like it was some foreign name he was trying to learn that he had never heard before. “Ty… Ler… _Tyler.”_ He said it a few more times as if it was the only proper way to truly meet somebody. Once he decided he had murmured it enough times, he finally said, “It’s very nice to meet you.” He gave my hand two firm pumps. “Friday. 4 o'clock,” he pointed to me. “Clancy Creek. Don’t forget, okay?” 

“Yeah. Clancy Creek at 4 o'clock on Friday. I won’t forget,” I nodded as my other hand found its way onto the broom handle again.

“Sick. I’m sure I’ll see you here before that, though. Later dude.” Angel Boy zipped his electric aqua bag up and flashed one last grin to me before he left me alone to be completely dumbfounded.

The encounter felt like something I had made up. Like some kind of fever dream. Nobody acts like that! I laughed quietly to myself as I swept up the hall. _What a weirdo_ , I thought. The little elf upstairs was hard at work with scribbling out every detail of that meeting and recounted everything back to me as I worked to close up shop.

At least I had a name for him. A proper name. _Joshua._ Little elf upstairs much preferred Angel Boy, though.


End file.
